Develop Reference

Are inapp purchases possible without having your own registration system?

I know that they are possible since I implemented consumable purchases and they work but:
If I upload a new version of the app or re install it the consumable purchases are gone. Does not matter if for iOS or android. I used the device ID but that is not reliable and does indeed change in some scenarios
I would like to offer inapp purchases (consumable) and keep track how many a user has. Ideally over multiple devices but for sure for multiple installations (meaning they keep them after updates or reinstalls)
Is this even possible without some kind of login? Is it possible to implement subscriptions without this problem? I use revenuecat if that matters but asking more generally

In case of consumable in app purchase it is definitely lost and cannot be recovered across devices without saving them for the relevant user. You may have to create your own saving and recovery system if you wish to make it available across devices.. maybe you can take a look at non consumable products or subscription

Good afternoon
Theoreticaly Possibly, but there are several ways that you need to use all together in order for everything to work correctly.
For example - It is necessary to store the user_id in the keyChain, then the saved id will not change when reinstalling (this only applies to iOS). It is also necessary to get information from the Receipt for different users (with different devices) but having one check and merge them. Therefore, it is desirable to have 2 ids for the user user_id and device_id. You need to receive and process webhooks from Apple/Google to understand the current status of a particular product. Doing this on the client is not the most pleasant experience. Some of this is generally impossible to do only on the client side.
Better use the ready-made solution Apphud, RC ...
If you have a free time and a team of backend developers, then you can implement all this yourself.
Look at the internal implementation of the services above (the code is open) how they work with Receipts and ids. You will understand that without the usage of unique identifiers you will encounter a lot of problem cases.

Get transaction list of inAppPurchases on iOS/Android

Do the api's provided by Apple and Google make it possible for an app coder to get a list of all transactions for all users for an inapppurchase, or a list of all approved transactions?
Similarly, is it possible to get a list of all paying users who have made an inapppurchase?
Ideally, it would be great to do this without having to write native code (eg either using a cordova plugin or querying the app store using an http-based api).
Thanks.

On Android, it is possible to get a list of all transactions and their current state under 'Order Management' on the Google Play Console. For each transaction it provides the ID, date/time, item purchased, status, $ paid.
I haven't found comparable info for iOS. The only way to figure out about inAppPurchases is to query the app store regarding a single device (from that device).
If someone else knows a way to do what was requested in the original post, please post it.

There is an sdk/backend that is designed for this purpose, called revenuecat. It is a paid service.

How can I display leaderboards (reset once a week) with branch.io

I've got a question regarding branch.io referral program. Is it possible to develop the following userstory:
each user starts with a default bucket
the user signs up and can add a profile image (increase credits), follow us on facebook (+credits)
once a week we trigger a "reset" and the credits in the bucket of all users are reset (=0); we can also add a new bucket if needed.
during the "competition" we want to display a leaderboard of the "best" users with the most referred installs.
So, this was just a brief explanation. But I hope you get the idea. Is this possible (via iOS, Android, Webhooks and API)?
Question #2: Is it possible to display this leaderboard also on the frontend and increase credits if the web-app user does something special?

Austin from branch here. To be honest, this is a pretty custom use of the out of the box referrals program we provide.
There's no specific API that does exactly what you want, but you can create it by storing updates in realtime as credits are updated to Branch users. However, this will require you to host this on your own servers.
However, if you want to display credits and referrals for an individual user, we have a whole plug and play guide for it here:
Show Referrals for a single user: https://dev.branch.io/recipes/referral_links_with_incentives/ios/#showing-referrals
API Documentation: https://dev.branch.io/references/http_api/
Wish there was a better solution for this, but hopefully this helps answer your question!
Austin

How to obtain information about downloads, total installation, and active installation from my published android applications programmatically?

I have a few questions regarding android market(Google play). How can I list my published application by accessing from my google account? What I have done so far is using my application package name as a query string to search my application and display all information which I used android market api to do it. Is there another better way to display all my published or installed applications by accessing from my google accounts?
My second question is about detecting number of downloading and installations of my published application. I have found only google analytics so far(for free) which I need to embedded some codes to monitoring my application. Is it possible for me to access those information from android market publish page . I have found that publish page contains information that I need.
Edited: For second question, I would like to obtain statistical information without adding any new code to my application. Is it possible to provide only google account to grant the permission to get those information?
My application is published. If I am using google analytics to monitoring my application do I need to start my counting from zero?
Sorry for my English and my little knowledge about this.
Thanks in advance..
Edited: .. I have found an application, called "analytics" that is what exactly I want to do. But I still cannot figure it out how it works..

The only place you will find this kind of information is on your Developer page. That said, if I were wanting to do what you are, I would put up an app on App Engine that either parsed my Dev page on request, or on a schedule. I mention App Engine as personal preference here, you could obviously use anywhere you can host scripts on.
You can then do what you like with the data you have collected, and your app can request this from your site. Assuming you have no qualms with publicising these numbers, you wouldn't need to scare users by authenticating, and would just need a plain html request.
Edit:
In your language of choice, you would need to request your developer page (the one that lists apps and their install count) and would also need to authenticate as yourself to get it. It's for this reason I would use your own hosting if you can. I can't be more specific than this, as I don't know what language you're most likely to be using. It should be trivial to find out how to do an html request and step through the page in whatever language it is though. App Engine pages are written in Java or Python and deployed to the server, while other obvious options are PHP or Perl. On my own server I would most likely use Perl as it's ideal for ripping up html with regexps.

Webservice for Android Market purchases

As Google stores your purchases of Android apps, I was wondering if they are somehow offering a webservice that can be used to check if a certain app has been purchased. To me this seems the most secure way of distinguishing free and paid users from within my app.
It would not only defeat piracy, but would also allow for managing a database of legally registered users, by a one-time check through this service.
What are your solutions to this matter?

Google provides a library for you. See here.
Note that this has been compromised in unprotected apps, so you should use something like ProGuard. The link above contains more information.
Finally, keep in mind that the Android Market is not the only app market for Android out there. Amazon has their own DRM.

At this particular moment there is one way to check.
The Android Market authenticates purchases through Google Checkout, but Google has not implemented the Checkout API to synchronize Market purchases. So calls like that check the status of an order do not work. Maybe Google doesn't want dev's to get a hold of customer emails? Either way, I do not know why it does not exist, it seems to me that if Google simply made this service available we could implement a far more superior security system that would better utilize the methods of obfuscation. As it is at the moment, a hacker can simply look for a specific class like the ILicenceService and hook it.
The only way at the current moment is to download a list of current purchases. You can do this using an authenticated http call. The drawbacks to doing this are pretty large though. First, the list it provides only extends back 31 days (so you've got to make sure you keep everything). Second, you would have to call and parse at least every ten minutes. Actually faster than that, most users want to play their games when they buy them. Third, if your service, or server goes down, that is precious information that is being requested almost instantly by your users.
I don't know how many dev's are currently utilizing this process, I considered it, but am just going to keep complaining to Google for a better method.

You could piggy back off of the LVL. I have just implemented a similar system.
Perform Check via LVL.
On success make a post to your own web server and store whatever details you need, i.e. DeviceID etc.
You could also perform checks to your own server even when the LVL check fails and allow things like trial periods etc.